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TRAGEDY AND COMEDY
TRAGEDY AND COMEDY In some such way as this we may state the simplest set of postulates that makes any adequate intellectual distinction between these two types of composition. But once we have laid down the set of postulates and got the distinction made, we are instantly struck by the fact that the conventions which distinguish absolute comedy from absolute tragedy have never been so marked in the novel, or so important, as they have in the play. The novel, we know, learned its technique from the drama; the principal Elizabethan novels are the work of men who were, with the exception of Lyly, dramatists primarily; and Fielding, who learned a great deal of fictional style and structure from Cervantes, and helped make the novel epic, learned perhaps still more from his long and prolific apprenticeship to dramaturgy, and may be said to have made the novel dramatically epic. Yet it is true that most great plays up to 1800 are quite squarely either tragedies or comedies, whereas most great novels of the same period tend to be not so definitively either one or the other. Or if this is an overstatement of the fact, at least it is true that there are more exceptions to the technical difference in fiction than in drama. And after 1837 the sharpness of the distinction quite disappears from the novel; plays, what plays there are, remain one thing or the other, but novels tend to become a mingling of both. Why is it, one is prompted to ask, that the novel, which learned its rudiments from the play, should have gone farther than the play toward abolishing the hard- and-fast distinctions? Why especially should there have been so few pure tragedies in fiction? I find a tentative answer to the second of these questions in the fact that the novelist's audience almost necessarily consists of one person at a time, or at least of one person in a place, whereas the dramatist's audience consists of many persons simultaneously in one place. The physical process of novel- reading is solitary; that of enjoying a play is social. And it seems on the whole to be true that, although every extreme of emotion is intensified when we share it, so that all emotion is potentially socializing, still we can bear to laugh in solitude more easily than to cry in solitude. We can feel happy alone ; but when we sorrow, we instinctively crave the support of a whole social fabric made up of sorrow, of which our grief is only one thread. It is quite possible that if novels were habitually enjoyed as works to be read aloud to vast numbers of hearers, they might have a quite different emotional tradition. It may be so ; the conjecture is at least of some passing interest. But this is only a tentative explanation of some things in the past; it is certainly inadequate to explain the breaking down of the distinction between tragedy and comedy in modern drama itself. I think perhaps the habit of reading in solitude did produce originally the well-recognized demand for "happy endings" in stories; but that explanation certainly cannot reach beyond the date at which the drama begins to choose other endings than the flatly tragic and flatly comic. Nor do I think this phenomenon in the drama results from the fact that the drama, after a long period of insignificance, begins for the first time to learn from the novel, thus reversing the former process. No: the disappearance of tragedy and comedy in their pure state, both on and off the stage, is a symptom of some larger tendency at work in everything— in life as well as art. If the question were of art alone, we might conjecture that the novel, as the longer and more leisured of the two forms, is automatically freer to present the mingled good and evil, sadness and joy, of life; and that the play, as the more compact and selective form, has to go farther toward artificial exclusion and emotional unity. But, as I say, all such explanations show themselves inadequate when drama begins to follow the same tendency. The fact is, there is a general loss of emotional finality all through art; poetry and painting, as well as fiction and drama, try much less hard than formerly to produce the pure extremes of emotion, and much harder to produce the complex intermediate emotions. I have already pointed out that, generally speaking, emotion becomes proportionately less important in literature and intellectual analysis more important. The loss of pure tragedy and comedy is part of this tendency—for the deeper analysis goes, the less content can it be with emotional finality of any sort; the more it sees that any pretence of finality is counter to the nature of reality. The important point about both the tragic ending and the comic ending is that they are endings, full stops; whereas in life there is no "finis" at the foot of the page—even death is a full cadence for but one person, and all the interests and issues of which he was a part go on practically without interruption. Life is always re-creating itself out of the past, perpetuating the residua of old things in new shapes, and denying the beholder any sort of conclusiveness whatever. And art, if it is to suggest the nature of life so analyzed, must attach less and less importance to beginnings and endings, more and more importance to what comes between them. Indeed, everything does come between them: the only real beginning is the beginning of the world, the only real ending is the end of time. Since the conditions under which the artist works prevent these from being "copy, " he gets along with a segment cut out from somewhere between, and frankly recognizes that it is a segment, and not a whole. II Suppose we undertake first to look with some particularity into the reasons for the disappearance of absolute tragedy in the novel. It is obvious that the analytic mood which I have called the realistic spirit is more interested in the reasons for human failure than in the mere fact of failure; for the realistic spirit is essentially the inquiring spirit that wants to understand the nature and hidden significance of acts and their obscure consequences. Now, this fact imposes upon the realistic procedure, at the outset, a limitation which denief_3 the very nature of tragedy and comedy. You can give your undivided emotional sympathy to a person engaged in an effort to attain a certain object or ideal : you can joy in his success or sorrow in his failure, as comedy and tragedy call upon you to do. But you cannot give your emotional sympathy, or any part of it, to a reason for anything. A reason is just something that is so; it has no more emotional implications in it than the binomial theorem. Fiction written in the scientific spirit, then, transfers the appeal very largely from the heart to the head ; the emotional elements may be present, but the accent is not at all on their emotionality. Most of the emotions present in fiction of the last quarter century exist as facts to be understood, —that is, as experiences of the characters, —not as effects to be felt. This would remain true even if scientific fiction dealt in absolutely sharp beginnings and conclusive endings; the endings would still not be tragic or comic, because they would not be resorted to for the sake of making us feel deeply about them. Fiction parts company with tragedy and comedy just in so far as it transfers its province from feeling to thought. But of course modern realistic fiction does not keep the finality either, any more than it does the emotion. It cuts out its segment of life in such a way that as much as possible of the whole may be represented, and makes its intensive analysis of that segment for the sake of its bearing on the whole. It is hardly necessary to remind ourselves again that the realistic spirit is the outcome of seeing life as an organic and evolutionary unit, or that the modern sense of things is the sense of "living in the whole, " as John Addington Symonds finely phrased it. Now, it is obvious that there can be no tragedy for the whole. The novelists of an elder generation tried, often with immense success, to rouse the feeling that the world revolved for their few chosen men and women ; when the book was over, the world stopped. On laying down the book, one walked about for hours in a daze, until life could assert itself and make things real again. One was made to feel temporarily that the fortunes of those few men and women were everything ; they were given to us for their own sake. No one experiences anything of that sensation on reading the characteristic modern novels. They fortify in us the feeling that life goes on just the same—the life of which the characters make a part, and for the sake of which they are called upon to exist. Whatever happens to them, nothing much happens to the world : it is the same world, except that, if the novelist has served us well in his own chosen way, we know it a little better. You cannot get the sense of complete tragedy out of a contemplation of lives presented as part of human society, whatever happens to those lives; because society is safe, and beyond the reach of ultimate tragedy. Society is, to all human intents and purposes, immortal. Really, then, there can hardly be any such thing as a tragedy written from the modern point of view, with the emphasis on society, unless it is written by a pessimist. The pessimist, who sees the good in man. as mortal, the evil in the world as immortal, can represent the good as extinguished, decisively and irretrievably, by the evil, as Mr. Hardy does in his almost insupportable last novel, Jude the Obscure. But mark : even that is not quite bona fide tragedy: for authentic tragedy always tacitly appeals to our feeling that the triumph of evil over good is an abnormality, a monstrous perversion; it evokes a rebellious grief. And pessimism makes that abnormality normal, an expression of the world-principle as the pessimist interprets it; and the properly tragic emotion shrivels from rebellion to a numbed and helpless grief. Pessimism in modern art invariably defeats itself, as a point of view available to art, by turning thus into morbidity. It gives us nothing of the equality which is essential to the tragic struggle; the disaster is predestined. On the whole the modern spirit, except when pessimistic, is much too broadly analytical to see any individual human failure as unrelieved and hopeless, or any evil without its interpenetration of good. And most of the characters who fail in modern fiction achieve in doing so some kind of success which outweighs the failure—if not for themselves, then for others. The best modern novels follow Dr. Johnson's philosophy of the vanity of human wishes: we may not get out of life exactly what we are trying for, and we certainly do not get what we first began by wishing, but we may get something potentially worth much ragre- Silas Lapham, the pivotal character of the great American novel (which, like many things we are always anticipating, is to be sought in the past), fails in his business, sees his new house burn down, and knows that his own short-sighted folly is chargeable with the whole sum of disaster; he is a broken and disappointed man, who will never be whole again. But at the same time he has recovered the faith of his wife, the love of his daughters, and a kind of self- respect which he had begun to lose in the intricate chicaneries of high finance; and Mr. Howells shows him to us at the last making the best of being on simplified terms with life and with himself—at least knowing his own heart as he had not done, and willing to believe that "nothing can be thrown quite away; and it can't be that our sins only weaken us. " The partial success brought out by the partial failure, the moral or spiritual gain wrested from the material or physical loss—this is the objective of most modern fiction that is worth discussing. No disaster is complete so long as there is this to be got out of it, "Living in the whole" and seeing the remoter implications of one's acts means that failures in themselves desperate and, by the older philosophy, irretrievable are to be read as prefaces to hope—the travail of our collective life as it struggles to bring forth some community of good, or the growing pains of rebellious youth in its slow and painful discovery of what life is. 11111, III The conventions of comedy have remained on the whole stronger in the novel than those of tragedy, just as comedies have remained more numerous than tragedies; but those conventions too have declined as the sense of finality weakened in our contemplation of life, and they may be said now to have vanished altogether. The Victorian novel tended to conclude, as Professor Winchester has put it, with "sugared marital felicity, with 'God bless you, my children, ' and ten thousand a year";' but more and more there grew upon the novelist a perception that life is disillusion, and books like David Copperfield and Bleak House, Vanity Fair and Pendennis show us in the last chapter persons who have both gained and lost something as they tried to cope with life ; persons who have known defeat and futility, who have renounced and outgrown, and who can see that life has been on the whole good. But the comedy of manners does cling until astonishingly late to its pretence that the story is all told when the last page is turned. The end of the book is the end of the character. Partly, of course, this effect is produced by the old convention that success in love, crudely denoted by an engagement ring or a marriage license, is the triumphal apex of any life, and that after the hero has "won" the heroine their careers cease to be of interest. This convention has pretty well disappeared now; success in getting married no longer is assumed to mean success in marriage; and success in marriage is our modern definition of success in love. The disappearance of this romantic illusion about love has been exceedingly good for fiction in one way: it has increased the age, hence the maturity, hence the interest, of the characters, and by so doing has made its picture of life less overbalanced by the sentimental. But, as I say, the convention of the sentimental ending, with its absolute finality, did persist surprisingly long; and to this day one can find new novels in which the last two pages line all the characters up, just before the ultimate curtain falls, in a neat semi-circle across the stage, each ready with a tabloid version of his whole future life before he takes his leave of the reader with a bow. So long as the novel kept to this meticulous habit of accounting for everybody and all his relations, and exhausting the subject of what happened to whom, the characters necessarily assumed the relation of entertainers, xot that of fellow-men. Anyone can see the superiority, if only on grounds of verisimilitude, of the custom which lets a character, when he has served his purpose to the story, simply drop out of it, as persons drop out of our lives; and which allows us to leave the major personages as folk who may still live on and go about their business—folk whom, for all we know to the contrary, we may meet again somewhere, as we so often meet the characters of Trollope. Whatever the persistence of the comic conventions, one can see, I think, that they are gradually forced downward into the popular sentimentalism, out of artistically conscientious fiction; for the same set of logical considerations which applies to tragedy governs comedy as well, and the realistic view of life is the death of either. If life is a mingled affair of profit and loss, why should its counterfeit presentment strike a balance all on one side of the ledger The form of comedy is too symmetrical, too neat in its efficient disposal of everything, to mirror that life in which nothing is independently so, in which all things are interdependent. The democratic feeling of solidarity, the vision of a common destiny and an indefeasible community of interest, forbids us lightly to compute reality in terms of individual successes. The same logic which refuses to see anything as absolute failure in relation to the whole, refuses to see anything as absolute success. And as life intensifies and reinforces in us, through experience and observation, the sense of its own inconclusiveness, , comedy tends to degenerate into pure farce, which, having little or no representative value, may be dismissed as purely decorative, and therefore as having nothing to do with this discussion of purposes and meanings. On the whole, I think we may say that the hope of a school of really sufficient modern comedy is so fantastically remote as to rank among the impossibilities. For only one thinkable condition of things could produce such a comedy: a practically perfect society, such as Meredith foresaw. In such a society, there would be no loss and no waste ; the good of one would be the good of all, and every defeat of something by something else would be equally a victory for both. Of such community of interest, we have now only the vision. The crucial happenings take the form of contests between things and interests so different that every gain somewhere means loss somewhere else, — contests of class, of race, of power, —and in all these there is at least an undercurrent of the tragic. This the modern observer of life must feel and see, if he is truly to communicate anything to us. Not for him, not for us ever again, perhaps, the old artificial simplifications of unmitigated tragedy and comedy. IV The new fashion in endings makes all fiction stop, as the short story is recommended to begin, in medias res. To appreciate the difference of fashions through one of its trivial manifestations, compare the closing paragraphs of half a dozen novels by Dickens with those of half a dozen by Mr. Hardy. And the point, small though it is when taken by itself, is indicative of the real change which has come over the artist's attitude toward life. "Begin at the beginning, set everything in order, and end when you are through"—thus the old rationale of composition, a sacrosanct formula. But the modern artist despairs of beginnings and endings; to him everything is middle; he is quite without the sense that every drama can be played up to the ultimate curtain, and that to stage it is an easy thing; and this is the reEk, son for his abandonment of the old conclusive endings which make tragedy and comedy, and for his adoption of the novel or play as being, in the words of an overworked phrase, a "slice of life. " Now, it is a very simple affair to say that a piece of fiction should be a piece of life, and that it should pretend to no completeness which life does not possess; but it is another and much more involved thing to make it fulfill these conditions. To begin with, it implies that impersonality in the contemplation of life can actually. be carried to that pitch where the artist understands things as they are, absolutely without any personal bias for one kind of thing as against another, and without coloring anything with the tones of his own temperament. The realist's effort is, of course, to suppress himself and let life speak for itself; his technique is indeed objective. But, in this utter and abysmal philosophical sense, it is exceedingly doubtful whether there is any such thing as objectivity. Professor Warner Fite has some profitable remarks on this point: "As I prefer to put it, realism stands for denatured human experience. For without denying that something is meant by an unvarnished fact, it strikes me that the phrase as it stands expresses a contradiction in terms. I may distinguish the fact as presented in your varnish from the fact as it appears to me, and thus, by allowing for your varnish and for mine, procure for the fact some measure of independence. But a fact without any varnish whatever seems to me, if facts are to be related to perception, to be no fact at all ; and how the world is to be described from nobody's point of view, I cannot imagine. When I try to state facts in this fashion I find myself in difficulty. The chair, for example, is the favorite philosophical illustration of a very solid fact. Yet when I attempt to describe the chair, I am confronted at once by arms, legs, seat, and back—terms that express a human prejudice ; and when I try to dehumanize my Description, I seem to find no terms that would make the chair recognizable, none that do not seem to transform a familiar human fact into something rather 'metaphysical. ' "And if it be objected that my way of knowing, or of describing, the chair leaves the real chair untouched, then I am compelled to wonder what that particular reality would be in a world that knew nothing of chairs—in a primitive world, for example, where everyone squatted. Something real, I do not doubt ; yet still something intelligible, intelligible now from the standpoint of primitive life. If an automobile would cease to be an automobile in a world without carburetors, I cannot see how it could remain an automobile in a world without chauffeurs. When I try to conceive what that reality would be which is wholly unaltered by being known—to distinguish what the chair is in itself from what it becomes when known to be a chair, the cold fact from the humanly familiar and effective fact—I seem to find nothing but that metaphysical, atomic chair—the chair as varnished by the scientific point of view—which is not 'really' a chair and is only doubtfully known. "It seems, then, that to be a realist is not so simple a task as it appears. We live in a world which we have surely not originated, a real and not a merely imaginary world; and, on the other hand, we live in a world which, just in being real, is more or less familiar and (strangely) more or less responsive to our efforts, and which, in its familiarity and responsiveness, reflects at every point our human point of view. In a word, the real world, for philosophy as well as for literature, is the fruit of a transaction between two parties; and a realism in which either of the parties is ignored is a mere pseudo-realism. "' So that when the artist looks at what he calls "the facts of life, " he is looking at a congeries of facts as seen by him; and, having seen them at all, he can no more keep himself out of them than he can see the back of his own head without a mirror. The relations between and among them, those relations which are all-important to art, are the relations which he sees. We do well to keep these facts in mind when we talk about "pure" realism, absolute "objectivity. " But if realism in this fundamental sense is impossible, it does not follow that it is impossible for the artist to try for it. As a matter of fact, the channel of fiction in the last thirty years is given a quite new turn by his persistent ingenuity in trying for it; and in the process the novelist, unless he has the clearest notion of his own limitations as an observer of life, is especially subject to two dangers arising through the inability of mere observation to do what is asked of it. To begin with, there is always the danger that a piece of art which purports to be a slice of life merely, will quite miss achieving a Design in the artistic sense; will have no pattern except a single observer's experience. And that is assuredly not enough unity for the work of art; otherwise, a stroll up Forty- Second Street in the crowded hours, if one kept one's eyes open, would be a work of art. Many novels, and more and more plays, of the last two decades seem to work toward the ideal of replacing subject-matter by mere matter; the ideal of summing up life one fact after another, as science sums up the world of matter and force, instead of representing life by facts chosen for their representative value. And the result is inevitably inartistic shapelessness. There can be no art without some form other than that arising from the mere juxtaposition of facts and events in real life; because art is, almost by definition and certainly by the nature of its appeal, a selecting and sifting process. But this is not so serious as one of its implications, the second danger of which I spoke. If art be without a pattern, and remain shapeless except in so far as it gives the artist's report of things which occurred together in factuality, then it will quite have failed to be a criticism of life; that is, to have any centre of purpose or meaning at all. It will be simply life beheld at one remove, and not illumined. The novelist will be supplying material which he himself does not know how to interpret. If he is baffled by his own copy, —we can hardly call it a creation, for the creator knows what his creatures exist for, — wherewithal shall we be enlightened? For these two reasons primarily, I am afraid we shall have to admit that the "slice-of-life" method is greater in its claims than in its fulfillment; especially when we remind ourselves again that the novelist, whatever his intention, cannot possibly give us a story which is a slice of life and nothing else. The net result of this ideal is to suppress the elements of choice and accent which are the postulates of art, and to blur and perhaps defeat the purpose which the artist, by virtue of his being a conscious entity at all, cannot help having, even if he does not know that he has it. In undertaking to suppress his own philosophy, he undertakes what no one can perform; because our philosophy is the window through which we have to see everything. Moreover, if he undertake to do that, he will deprive his work of what does most to justify its existence; for it is his province to recreate life in shapes which will show his considered interpretation of it. To say that he has no opinion, or that his opinion means nothing, is to confess mere disintegration and failure. V Among the perplexities and dilemmas which attend realism, it is not altogether to be wondered at if the novelist flounders, uncertain of his way. It is easy enough to adjure him to have faith; it is easy enough to point out to him that in the spiritual history of mankind faith has accomplished more than knowledge; it is easy enough to say that what we need is a renascence of the "will to believe. " And it is undoubtedly true that there are many invaluable lessons for the modern practitioner of fiction in the sharply tragic or comic versions of life which make up the history of the novel. But every such plea fails to recognize the difficulty of the modern situation in its play on the modern mind. The modern mind knows too much to throw away what it knows merely in order to believe something that it would like to believe. Moreover—and this is an incomparably more important point—we are developing a temperament that loves reality, that finds it sufficient and swims and floats in it and is buoyed up by it as by faith. It seems to me unthinkable—though "unthinkable" is a very large word, and many unthinkable things have come to pass—that the modern artist can experience any change of heart or of mind which shall result in his picturing life as a thing that comes out even, with so much happiness dealt out there, and so much retribution here, to every man according to his desert. I do not see what hope we dare cherish of a future in which the outcome of things shall be determinate instead of indeterminate; and until that future comes I do not see how we can ask the realist so far to abandon reality as to depict things as happening the way he would like them to, not the way they do happen. It seems from this angle preposterous to ask the novelist to invoke any forces except those intricate ones which he sees humanly operative in the naturalistic world about him ; forces which, so far as he can study them, achieve first of all the perpetuation of life and consciousness, and then the evolution of certain social ideals of conduct and of organization, but never by any chance a degree of progress which does not point beyond to something else still unattained. Life seems to be simply a preface to more life, a perpetual preparing for something that we get no nearer to, a march in a dream, in which we exhaust ourselves with marching and come out where we started. And the only happy man is he who learns to love marching itself, with all its fatigue and its uncertainty of a destination. The old tragic and comic forms reflect the belief in some kind of destination, — except indeed when they are mere profitless fable, —but the new realism must continue, seemingly, to record the march. The question is, then, whether love of life and of those who live it is in itself enough for a faith. For after all this is the choice : between the temper that loves life and finds it sufficient, and the temper that loves life but finds it insufficient until it is explained and exalted by faith in something outside it. I say nothing about the realist who does not love life at all, who writes about it in distrust or contempt or stupor. Realism has found room for him too, with his several kinds of morbidity and fleshliness and insistence on the primal brute in man. If he were a factor in the choice, we should have less, not more, to hope for. But the ma. p, who does honestly love human nature as it is, and does find the sight of humanity good, so that he really does not want any leverage to be exerted on the world from without; to put the matter quite bluntly, the man who does not want a God, and would regard the existence of one as an unwarrantable and meaningless intrusion into a scheme which means enough just by virtue of its own existence—has that man, in democracy, solidarity, and the sense of kinship with his fellows, enough to hold to, and to build a great art upon? It is a very important question, because that man is the artist of the present and, in all likelihood, of the future. Meanwhile, it is useful for us to see that his philosophy of life does not cut him off from criticism of life. He is still free to choose what he likes, what he wants, and to express his choice in a shape which shall have consistency and symmetry. If he distrust life, he can only express himself in comedies which turn into farce, and in tragedies which show the ascendancy of the brute over the man. But if he trust life, he is free to single out the elements which inspire his confidence, and to make of them his message; he is free, as Miss Margaret Sherwood says in a finely idealistic essay, 1 for the "enduring realism" of "helping to make greater things real. " After all, it is only in one generation, the present, that realism has become apathetic ; and three of the greatest men of the literary generation before it, all of them essentially moderns and realists, preached a fine idealism. Meredith had a vision of something amounting to human perfectibility through purely human agencies; Henry James proved that human nature is even now, in those of its aspects which he loved, rarer and finer than it commonly knows itself to be; and William Dean Howells-, a generation ahead of even these two in discovering the religion of place, was preaching the most homespun realities and the "wise provincialism" of Royce at a time when patriotism was shame-faced and the intellectual ideal of the Western world was a shallow esthetic cosmopolitanism. I can explain this paradox, the sluggishness of faith in life in our second generation of realists, only by the enervating weariness which comes upon any movement after it has outlived the inspiration of newness. The older realists welcomed as a challenge the dawn of a world in which man must do all for himself. They took up the defiance with the spirit of youth, always sanguine of its own powers and keen for the fight. Realism is older now, and begins to wonder, to think twice. But one generation is too short a time to be discouraged about. Meanwhile, we speculate about the new tragi-comedy of the real which must save imaginative fiction from purposeless realism, just as realism saved it from tragedy and comedy in which the purpose was too shallow and too false ; and we find a clue to that renewing spirit of fiction, the spirit of idealistic realism, in such words as these of Mr. Howells, written long ago in answer to Matthew Arnold's comment that there was no "distinction'! in our national life:— 4. I would gladly persuade all artists intending greatness in any kind among us that the recognition of the fact pointed out by Mr. Arnold ought to be a source of inspiration to them, and not discouragement. We have been now some hundred years building up a state on the affirmation of the essential equality of men in their rights and duties, and whether we have been right or been wrong the gods have taken us at our word, and have responded to us with a civilization in which there is no 'distinction' perceptible to the eye that loves and values it. Such beauty and such grandeur as we have is common beauty, common grandeur, or the beauty and grandeur in which the quality of solidarity so prevails that neither distinguishes itself to the disadvantage of anything else. It seems to me that these conditions invite the artist to the study and the appreciation of the common, and to the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which unite rather than sever humanity, if he would thrive in our new order of things. The talent that is robust enough to front the every-day world and catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face, need not fear the encounter, though it seems terrible to the sort nurtured in the superstition of the romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, the distinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or carving or writing. The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have the expression of America in art; and the reproach which Mr. Arnold was half right in making us shall have no justice in it any longer; we shall. be 'distinguished. '" Category:Humor Category:Emotional qualities of a story